Whether or not these patents will withstand judicial scrutiny in the long term is inconsequential. The patents have been issued and in the short term their owners will undoubtedly attempt to use them to extract funds from Android developers that build on top of ZXing to create barcode scanning-enabled mobile applications. Those that have managed to create an application that generates revenue will have to choose between paying up, folding, or taking the fight to court. I happen to know that some of these same patent holders have attempted to shake down other, non-Android, mobile application developers aggressively in the past.

What’s especially interesting is that this is an issue that Google appears to be carefully and studiously ignoring. While the EFF has been attempting to bust down some of these patents, that won’t be good enough in the short term. Until those patent hurdles are removed, developers will need to realize the risk that they may be facing by building on Android and the ZXing library.